The main goal in your legal marketing strategy, whether you’re the biggest firm in the world or a small town enterprise, is getting your message to the people who are looking for what you’re offering. It always sounds incredibly easy on paper, but it’s anything but. You have to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right content, all the while encouraging someone that you’re the best option in the shop window.
Looking at firms of all shapes and sizes helps determine the best practices that you can replicate at your firm to generate results, the mainstays of your legal marketing strategy essentially. The art of using SEO to rank higher is more important than ever. Make sure you shape up your on-page SEO and categorise each page to ensure everything is indexing/ranking.
A second must is embracing your content marketing plan, and ensuring that you’re consistently making and sharing great content! Many branches of your strategy exist, email marketing, PPC, social media, etc. All of which are key for getting great results. However, there are some extra trends that you can recreate to get you some extra results. Legal Habits that most law firms won’t be optimising for just yet, so here’s how you could get ahead of the curve!
Geography
This is all about thinking and focusing locally. It’s not about thinking small, we want growth and sustainability, but it’s about practicing what you preach, in the area that you preach it. Most potential clients will search locally before branching out. If you can be well ranked on someone’s first search, and come across as credible, reputable, and well-resourced, you’re more likely to be rewarded with a genuine lead.
Even if you’re a small firm who only covers one area, or an international firm who has offices in 25 locations, your offices and service area exists somewhere. Focus on winning those areas in search engine rankings with technical SEO changes, creating new catered content, and utilising online reviews and directories. You can also embed yourself in the community, joining local professional organisations, and attending events/conferences in your area. Your legal marketing strategy should be focused to find clients in the area where you actually practice law.
Encourage Interaction
Encouraging your visitors either on your social media or your website to take action is quite tricky. Anything you produce should be gently nudging someone to take the next step. You should have a call to action in place to get people to contact you, or leave the contact details, but engagement and interaction can be much more than just your CTA.
Create interactive quizzes or host polls/votes on your website. You can also use live chat bots to answer any FAQ’s, or just generally provide support for new users. Encourage older recurring users to leave reviews by engaging on your site, blog, and across your social media platforms. These interactive features prompt action, people like the instant gratification they get from answering quiz questions, voting in polls, or from direct conversation.
Build Trust With Authentic Content
It is very difficult for the general public to build trust with a business for the first time. Fundamentally people want to interact and buy legal services off people. Being authentic, transparent, personable, and responsible is so important for nurturing leads from the visitor stage through to the buy stage and beyond.
Engaging in corporate social responsibility sustainability and social projects can be key to developing relationships with new clients on a more personal level. The saying is cliche, but actions always speak louder than words. You can demonstrate transparency and integrity utilising social proof methods like video testimonials, client reviews, case studies and recommendations.
You can also create a mutually beneficial relationship by sharing news, trends, and giving away valuable information into your market. If you have a blog, be personable, and show a more humorous side to your firm alongside your informative content. Marketing interactions need to feel personalised, and authenticity doesn’t need to be a buzzword. You know that you are a real person reaching out, but your audience doesn’t, don’t make it feel like potential clients are buying from a scamming robot.
Managed Trackable Campaigns
Being able to easily track who is viewing your content, where they’re visiting from, and where your leads are coming from, will help you fine-tune your legal marketing strategy. Channels like blogging, email, paid ads, and organic search can easily be tracked with a tool like Google Analytics. The data insight will be invaluable in crafting campaigns in the future, and it will be easier to spot which demographics, locations etc. are the most successful. You’ll also identify which marketing channels need adjustments if the results are sub-par.
Having multiple tracked campaigns will result in a more complete lead generation strategy, and give you varying revenue streams. Always a bonus to have!
Be Mobile Friendly
At the end of 2020 Google started to implement mobile-first indexing on its search queries. This means that when Google is analysing your site, it is going to start looking at your mobile page to determine its ranking, before looking at your full site. If your optimisation for mobile is poor, it will severely impact your ranking. Today’s consumer is hungry for instant information. With the touch of your finger you can access everything and anything on your smartphone. People now search instantly to find information before checking on their laptop/pc devices later, so having a mobile optimised site is crucial, especially now that Google will be checking that mobile optimisation first.
Concluding Thoughts
Nailing the mainstays of your legal marketing strategy requires a lot of research and general tinkering. Fortunately, you can use tools like Google Analytics to understand what is working, what isn’t and what you can change in future. Make sure all your marketing channels are trackable! One of the most important, SEO, is key to organic growth, but you can customise it by being more area-specific and building leads in your local community.
Building interaction and trust is difficult online, so make sure you come across as personable and engaging, whilst also being a reputable source of expertise. Engaging in community projects to encourage sustainability or equality, attending community events, and just generally showing what you’re doing, rather than telling will go a long way. Oh and utilise video where possible, people don’t have the best attention span!!
Encouraging interaction can make conversation easier, and generate more leads, so be responsive and have a bit of fun with quizzes, polls and other interactive games. Utilising interactive marketing tools like VR can be an exceptionally good way to garner people’s interest. And lastly, make sure you’re mobile-friendly, especially now google will start punishing those who aren’t! If ever there was a time to build a mobile site, it’s now!
If you are looking for any more information about your digital marketing strategy needs, please contact us here for a free consultation!
